Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams (15 page)

Well,
nearly
complete. I did remember that the characters dropped into my mind fully-formed, and that I wrote the entire thing pretty much overnight. I don’t believe that stories ever write themselves; I know I’m in control at some level whether I’m fully aware of it or not. But there are moments when the cogs seem to be turning of their own accord and my role is simply to keep typing and let it happen. They are welcome, those moments, and always to be savoured.

How, then, could I possibly have forgotten one of those moments?

On further thought, it returned to me that this story hadn’t been entirely plain sailing. I originally wrote it for Peter McNamara’s
Alien Shores,
a landmark brick that brought Australian SF to new prominence here and overseas as well. Being in that collection was compulsory. I shipped this new story off to Peter with my fingers firmly crossed behind my back, because I suspected the ending wasn’t completely sound and I had no idea how or how to fix it.

He liked it well enough. But he offered me a way to correct the ending that was in retrospect both blindingly obvious and deeply profound.

Things should connect up,
he said (or words to that effect).
Alek Maas is a director. The aliens are trying to fake first contact using special effects but they’re no good at it. The two things fit.

It had never occurred to me to think of stories that way—not consciously, anyway. I just followed my gut and wrote them. Looking back on it now, I’m amazed I ever sold anything until Peter put me right. I owe him, not just for fixing this particular story, but for showing me one simple way to improve my storytelling across the board.

The pieces have to fit.

Peter died in 2004 and is greatly missed by his friends in the science fiction community. I am proud to call myself one of them. There will never be enough opportunities to say thanks.

<>

~ * ~

INTRODUCTION TO:

.......................................THE MAGIC DIRT EXPERIMENT

Magic dirt.
It’s a fine, multilayered image that perfectly suited this small piece, and the collection as a whole, to boot. It also happens to be the name of a very successful Australian band about which I know nothing at all, except that it exists and is liked by a lot of people.

I certainly don’t want to spend more words than the story itself contains explaining what I think it does. I’ll just say that the dream logic underpinning it made perfect sense to me at the time, and continues to make sense unless I apply any kind of reason to it. There are parallels to religion here, and to the creative process. Reason should apply to both these things, of course, but it’s fun to explore what happens when the usual logic is suspended. It was a relief for me to be able to think no deeper into the issue than that. Writing novels has pretty much spoiled me for magic realism, I’m afraid.

I should also mention Sharon. That’s my default name for female characters, inspired by the wife of a very close friend. Usually the name changes as I flesh out the character, but sometimes it doesn’t, and it just so happens that two stories in this collection retain the default names. Such is my laziness exposed, as it always should be, in the end.

~ * ~

THE MAGIC DIRT EXPERIMENT

At first it was just ordinary household dust. We planted it and grew bunnies, as grey and listless as you’d find under any bed. That wasn’t so encouraging. Then Sharon got the bright idea of planting other stuff, like paperclips and old buttons. They grew accordion file trees and spinning wheels respectively. Orphaned socks grew feet that stuck upright out of the ground on hairy lower legs. They quivered when you tickled them.

Of course, this wasn’t ordinary soil we were using. I guess it
really
started when the idea occurred to me of planting dirt. Hell, if seeds could grow in the ground, why couldn’t dirt itself? I took a nice brown nugget, rolled it up tight, and spat on it to keep it sealed. I buried it in its own little patch behind the rainwater tank out the back, where it would get both sun and shade, covering my bets. I watered it every day. Sharon thought I was an idiot, even when the first dark sprout appeared. Nothing much happened after that until I got tired of waiting and dug it up.

In the ground, spreading along a root system that made them look uncannily like potatoes, we found dirt-apples by the dozen. They were black and wrinkled as passionfruit but with the consistency of dried turds. They smelled faintly of vinegar and hot chips.

When we’d finished staring dumbly at them, we crumbled them up into a planter and patted them down. That’s when the dust came in handy, and the buttons and the socks. Later, I planted a fingernail. The hand that came up tried to grab me once, so I uprooted it and threw it out with the garbage.

Sharon suggested breaking into the urn on the mantelpiece and planting some of Grandad’s ashes, but the thought of what might happen terrified me. I imagined a giant tree blooming from the planter, its thick, swollen roots bursting out and digging into the ordinary soil around it, eager for sustenance. I pictured giant, veined pods swaying in a nonexistent breeze, growing larger and larger until they were bigger than me. I dreaded the possibility of coming home from school one day to find the pods unzipped and a new Mum brushing herself down with the help of her new older sisters.

I vetoed the idea immediately. It wasn’t just that I’d never liked that side of the family much. I was just worried about what would happen if we planted a bit of pod-Mum next. Would versions of me and Sharon grow from the giant pods? What would happen if we planted
them
?

I was in no hurry to meet my kids or grandkids—and besides, the spinning wheel we’d made had started to go all melty. I chucked out the dirt-apples before Sharon could change my mind or do something stupid on her own. Then I put it out of my head.

Sometimes late at night, though, I imagine what would happen if the hand I grew and the dirt-apples ever meet up again in a landfill somewhere. I hope they’re not mad at me for chucking them out. At least they’d have plenty of room to experiment, out among the piles of our garbage with no one to bother them.

And if something ever lumbers out of there looking for is creator, I guess I can always tell it the truth: to look in the ground beneath its feet. If it finds an answer, perhaps it’ll let me know.

<>

~ * ~

INTRODUCTION TO:

.......................................................NIGHT OF THE DOLLS

Roll back the clock to when the dreadful tsunami of 2004 devastated so many communities, Thailand, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka among them. Cue Steve Savile, who sold
Elemental,
a fundraising anthology, and invited all his friends to contribute. Pull in tight on this particular writer, stuck in the middle of a short story drought but determined to contribute. Make sure the light captures his terror the moment he learns who else will be in the book: Larry Niven, Brian Aldiss, Joe Haldeman, Jacqueline Carey, Kevin J. Anderson ... The list goes on.

Some writers get a lot of mileage out of taking excerpts from novels and releasing them as short stories or novellas. I’ve only successfully managed it with two pieces, and both are in this book. That’s partly because my novels tend to be tangled, sprawling affairs, with few clear start or end points that aren’t the start or end of the entire plot. Most times I’ve tried to untangle anything, it’s been a disaster. And by disastrous I mean boring or confusing, which are the worst crimes a story can commit.

“Night of the Dolls,” though, was different. I knew as I was writing this particular chapter of
Geodesica: Descent
that it was coming out well (an opinion with which Shane agreed when he cast his editorial eye over the text). That it was a flashback set apart from the rest of the story spared me the usual entangled-plot issues. I’d had some success with the story-within-a-story that ultimately became “The Butterfly Merchant”, so I figured I’d give it another go.

Elemental
came out from Tor, looked beautiful, and raised some money for people who really needed it.
Locus
reviewed
Geodesica: Descent
and said of this particular excerpt that it was “positively mid-career Silverbergian.”

Fade out on the look of satisfaction on this writer’s face. You know he wishes every project worked out this well.

~ * ~

NIGHT OF THE DOLLS

WITH SHANE DIX

August 15, 2381, on a sumptuous Southern Hemisphere spring evening in a region that had once been the birthplace of humanity, Isaac Forge Deangelis—barely seven years alive and still finding his feet in the mind-rich environment of Sol System—accepted the invitation to attend the Annual Graduates’ Ball. He did so on the advice of the Archon, whose encouragement that it would be an educational experience had been enough to convince him. Deangelis knew before stepping through the front door that it would be a challenge, and used the decadently quaint cover of “fashionably late” to dawdle along the way. It fit the theme of the evening, anyway.

The magnificent glass ballroom, constructed in the middle of nowhere on the boundary of old Richtersveld National Park, stood out against a backdrop of jagged mountains that bore the scars of their volcanic origins. The sun had already set, but the sky still glowed a deep, diamond-sparkled purple, fading to black in the east. A stand of immature quiver trees made him think of alien soldiers from a B-grade twentieth century movie as he walked up the long, sweeping drive, feeling like a complete fool in black tuxedo with a silk tie choking his Adam’s apple. The rest of him, scattered across the system, watched with a mixture of fascination and amusement at the anachronistic get-up. No matter how hard he tried to distract himself, attention kept returning to Earth.

His feet crunched on gravel with a raw, startling sound. A butler met him at the top of the marble stairs and offered to take his coat. The sound of voices grew louder as he trod thick red carpet through an arched doorway and entered the ballroom.

It was an odd experience, being in the company of so many people at once. Like the other guests, he freely roamed the Earth in both corporeal and virtual forms, interacting and communicating with his peers and himself via all manner of media, not needing to be face-to-face for any conceivable reason. The presence of his body on that particular evening, he had assumed, was a mere formality, no more or less anachronistic than the suit he had been asked to wear. Both could have been assembled at will in a moment, as could have a belly dancer’s outfit and a body to match. That he hadn’t yet decided what his physique would be when he finished his training wasn’t an issue he spent much time considering; while he waited, he wore a physical form of indeterminate age, with blonde hair and broad shoulders generated by the genes the Archon had bestowed upon him. It fitted.

The ballroom was expansive and gleaming and full of music. That was his first impression. His second was of the crowd, all beautiful and familiar and garbed in clothes no less outlandish than his own. Out of a thousand, two-dozen pairs of eyes looked up when he crossed the threshold—recognizing him, he assumed, just as he recognized them in turn. He went to wave.

Their true reason for looking at him became apparent when his body lost all connection to the rest of
him,
scattered across the system, and collapsed down to a mere individual.

He stumbled, as disoriented as if he had lost his sense of sight or balance. His perception of the world, and of himself, suddenly crashed to
just him
in
just one room.
Mentally reeling, he struggled to work out what could possibly have gone wrong. Since his awakening in many bodies scattered all across Sol System and experiencing the wondrous union that had risen out of his disparate thoughts, he had never been alone. The experience was jarringly dysfunctional, even frightening.

“Fear not, old boy,” said a familiar voice. A hand clapped down on his shoulder. Lazarus Hails was all grin and gloat as he came round to confront his fellow student. He too hadn’t fixed his final form, but his nose bore a patriarchal prominence that would remain later. “All part of the experience. You’ll find our bodies don’t quite work the same way any more, just like our minds.”

Deangelis watched Hails with some puzzlement. His balance centers seemed dangerously out of whack, and his speech patterns were different. He had clearly suffered the same mental impairment Deangelis had on entering the ballroom. Were they under attack? Could their brain damage possibly be
permanent
?

A laugh as sharp as a cut diamond drew Hails’s attention away from Deangelis. Lan Cochrane, dressed in a lime green flapper’s outfit, was puffing on a cigar—the genuine, burning article—and blowing rings of smoke at Frederica Cazneaux. Dark skinned and wonderful in a black suit of her own, Cazneaux batted the smoke away and turned down a chance to try a drag for herself, despite her friend’s insistence. Cazneaux held a cocktail glass containing an electric blue liquid balanced between two fingers; she raised a perfectly shaped eyebrow at Hails as he took Cochrane’s cigar and blew a messy cloud between them.

Deangelis looked around in disoriented wonder. Across the shimmering expanse of the ballroom, the vast majority of the Exarchate’s future leaders were engaged in similar physical debaucheries: dancing, drinking, snacking, smoking, and singing as though 350 years had rolled back and plunged them all in some upper class Light Ages.